Learning As An Adult

It's very hard to learn a language as an adult, but somehow kids manage to do it.

There's a theory (the Critical Period Hypothesis) claiming that this is due to innate differences between the child and adult brains; children have more plastic minds, they can still mold themselves while adults can't.

I can't pretend to have dived into the research on this even slightly, but I'm instinctively skeptical.

Kids don't have a choice about learning language; they're 100% immersed in a language-rich world, and they have to learn a language to be able to engage with it.

Also, kids are constantly trying and failing and trying again; they are taught and corrected and taught some more by existing language-knowers; they experience deliberate practice for years on end.

Adults – in my current circles, at least – are almost-never in such situations. They are rarely that desperate to speak a new language, they are rarely in situations where reality just forces them to learn a new language again, no matter how much work it takes or how much humiliation they face along the way.

In fact, a few times in my life, I've encountered adult migrants who (as best I could tell) had picked up entirely novel languages just by 1) moving to a place which they shared no languages with, 2) needing to speak to work to live.

Rightly or wrongly, I am basically convinced that this is true of almost-everything: that I could still learn big difficult things, again, if I tried. But I don't.